Describing his childhood love for Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert quotes a line from Annabel Lee:

When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal; I was a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf in my life. (1.5)

In the Russian version of Lolita Gumbert Gumbert also quotes this line and calls it “edgarovyi peregar” (Edgar’s aftertaste of alcohol):

"It was hard and sour, but, as Pushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with himself. In my idea of human life there is always some alloy of sadness, but now at the sight of a happy man I was filled with something like despair. And at night it grew on me. A bed was made up for me in the room near my brother's and I could hear him, unable to sleep, going again and again to the plate of gooseberries. I thought: 'After all, what a lot of contented, happy people there must be! What an overwhelming power that means! I look at this life and see the arrogance and the idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak, the horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, drunkenness, hypocrisy, falsehood. . . . Meanwhile in all the houses, all the streets, there is peace; out of fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one to kick against it all. Think of the people who go to the market for food: during the day they eat; at night they sleep, talk nonsense, marry, grow old, piously follow their dead to the cemetery; one never sees or hears those who suffer, and all the horror of life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of starvation. . . . And such a state of things is obviously what we want; apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him -- illness, poverty, loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like an aspen-tree in the wind -- and everything is all right.”

In a letter of March 27, 1894, to Suvorin Chekhov says that he was influenced by Tolstoy’s philosophy and mentions hypnotism:

But Tolstoy’s philosophy touched me profoundly and took possession of me for six or seven years, and what affected me was not its general propositions, with which I was familiar beforehand, but Tolstoy’s manner of expressing it, his reasonableness, and probably a kind of hypnotism. Now something in me protests, reason and justice tell me that in the electricity and heat of love for man there is something greater than chastity and abstinence from meat. War is an evil and legal justice is an evil; but it does not follow from that that I ought to wear bark shoes and sleep on the stove with the labourer, and so on, and so on. But that is not the point, it is not a matter of pro and con; the thing is that in one way or another Tolstoy has passed for me, he is not in my soul, and he has departed from me, saying: “I leave this your house empty.”

Humbert Humbert was born in 1910 (the year of Tolstoy’s death). In 1947, when he first meets Lolita (a girl of twelve), HH is thirty-seven. Pushkin (who was born in 1799, a hundred years before VN’s birth) died at the age of thirty-seven. In one of his best poems, Prorok (“The Prophet,” 1826), Pushkin mentions shestikrylyi serafim (a six-winged seraph) who appeared before him at the crossroad:

Духовной жаждою томим,

В пустыне мрачной я влачился, -

И шестикрылый серафим

На перепутьи мне явился.

Перстами лёгкими как сон

Моих зениц коснулся он.

Отверзлись вещие зеницы,

Как у испуганной орлицы.

Моих ушей коснулся он, -

И их наполнил шум и звон:

И внял я неба содроганье,

И горний ангелов полёт,

И гад морских подводный ход.

И дольней лозы прозябанье.

И он к устам моим приник,

И вырвал грешный мой язык,

И празднословный, и лукавый,

И жало мудрыя змеи

В уста замершие мои

Вложил десницею кровавой.

И он мне грудь рассек мечом,

И сердце трепетное вынул

И угль, пылающий огнём,

Во грудь отверстую водвинул.

Как труп в пустыне я лежал,

И бога глас ко мне воззвал:

"Восстань, пророк, и виждь, и внемли,

Исполнись волею моей,

И, обходя моря и земли,

Глаголом жги сердца людей".

Tormented by a spiritual thirst,

I stumbled through a gloomy waste,

And there a six-winged seraph

Appeared before me at the crossroad.

With touch as light as slumber,

He laid his fingers on my eyes,

Which opened wide in prophecy

Just as a startled eagle’s might.

Upon my ears his touch then fell,

And they were filled with noise and clangs:

I heard the heavens shift on high,

The whispering of angels' wings,

Sea monsters moving in the deep,

The growing grapevines in the vales.

And then he bent down towards my mouth,

My sinful tongue he ripped right out-

Its slander and its idle lies-

And with his bloody hand inserted

Between my still and lifeless lips

A cunning serpent's forked tongue.

And with his sword he cleaved my breast

Removed my shaking heart,

And then he seized a blazing coal,

And placed it in my gaping breast.

Corpse-like I lay upon the sand

And then God's voice called out to me:

"Arise, O Prophet, watch and hark,

Fulfill all my commands:

Go forth now over land and sea,

And with your word ignite men's hearts.

In Fragments of Onegin’s Journey ([XVII]: 13-14) appended to Eugene Onegin (1823-31) Pushkin confesses that he has admixed a lot of water unto his poetic goblet. Before going to Chyornaya Rechka (the Black River), the place of his fatal meeting with d’Anthès, Pushkin drank a glass of lemonade at Wolff et Béranger confectionery. In a letter of November 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov compares his story “Ward No. 6” to lemonade and complains of the lack of alcohol in the works of contemporary artists:

It is easy to understand you, and there is no need for you to abuse yourself for obscurity of expression. You are a hard drinker, and I have regaled you with sweet lemonade, and you, after giving the lemonade its due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it. That is just what is lacking in our productions—the alcohol which could intoxicate and subjugate, and you state that very well. Why not? Putting aside "Ward No. 6" and myself, let us discuss the matter in general, for that is more interesting. Let ms discuss the general causes, if that won't bore you, and let us include the whole age. Tell me honestly, who of my contemporaries—that is, men between thirty and forty-five—have given the world one single drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Repin's or Shishkin's pictures turned your head? Charming, talented, you are enthusiastic; but at the same time you can't forget that you want to smoke. Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, and dull time. We are stale and dull ourselves, we can only beget gutta-percha boys, and the only person who does not see that is Stasov, to whom nature has given a rare faculty for getting drunk on slops. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, as Burenin imagines, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line's being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.

Btw., in his story Zhenshchina s tochki zreniya p’yanitsy (“Woman as seen by a Drunkard,” 1885) Chekhov compares girls under sixteen to distilled water (I suspect that, despite HH’s protests, VN would have agreed with the author of “The Seagull”). Shestov’s essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), has for epigraph a line from Baudelaire’s poem Le Goût du néant (“The Taste for Nothingness”): Résigne-toi, mon cœur, dors ton sommeil de brute (Resign yourself, my heart; sleep your brutish sleep). The philosopher Lev Shestov was born in 1866. The name Shestov comes from shest’ (six). Charles Baudelaire is E. A. Poe’s French translator. Like HH, Baudelaire was born in Paris (the city where Shestov died in 1938). Baudelaire was born in 1821. A hundred years later, in 1921, Blok (the author of “The Twelve”) and Gumilyov (the author of “The Sixth Sense”) died in St. Petersburg. In the Russian Lolita Vivian Darkbloom (Quilty’s co-author) becomes Vivian Damor-Blok (Damor is her stage name, Blok is the name of one of her first husbands):

"Vivian Darkbloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. (Foreword)

Damor is an anagram of morda (snout, muzzle; mug). Alexander Blok’s poem Osenniy vecher byl. Pod zvuk dozhdya steklyannyi... (“It was an autumnal evening. To the glass sound of rain...” 1912), in which that gentleman and his shaggy dog appear, has an epigraph from E. A. Poe's poem The Raven. In Blok’s Neznakomka (“Incognita,” 1906) the drunks with the eyes of rabbits cry out: “In vino veritas!”

In the opening stanza of his poem Vstuplenie (“Prelude to Tent,” 1921) Gumilyov mentions the seraphs who in Heaven speak of Africa in a whispering voice:

Оглушенная рёвом и топотом,

Облечённая в пламя и дымы,

О тебе, моя Африка, шёпотом

В небесах говорят серафимы.

Of you, my Africa, deafened by howling
and the clatter of hooves, surrounded by fire and smoke,
it is of you they speak in Heaven,
seraphims whispering your name.

"That's the one," said Ostap. "If anyone says he's a girl, he may throw a stone at me!" (chapter 31)

Like Humbert Humbert, Ostap Bender constantly appeals to ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The characters of “The Twelve Chairs” include Fima Sobak (a friend of Ellochka the Cannibal). Fima is a diminutive of Serafima. The surname Sobak (that brings to mind Tobak, Cordula’s first husband in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) needs but the second “a” at the end to become sobaka (dog). Charlotte Haze (Lolita’s mother) dies because of a neighbor’s hysterical dog. Dogs that are not admitted at The Enchanted Hunters (the hotel in which Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together). In his Foreword to Gogol's Povesti (“Tales,” NY, the Chekhov Publishing House, 1952) VN points out that a writer often combines the hunter and the hunting dog:

The characters of Gogol’s Myortvye dushi (“Dead Souls,” 1842) include Sobakevich (one of the landowners visited by Chichikov). In “The Twelve Chairs” Bender and Vorobyaninov watch in the Columbus Theater an avant-garde stage version of Gogol’s play Zhenit’ba (“The Marriage,” 1842).